Russian media granted greater freedom

Russia is rightly under constant criticism for suppressing free speech. Yet a recent resolution of its supreme court indicates a strikingly positive trend to develop the legal conditions for journalistic freedoms.

Supreme court resolutions routinely explain statutory norms on topical legal issues to the country's lower courts. Last week the supreme court unanimously adopted a resolution on the mass media. Its novelty is not just in being the first such to directly interpret media law: it is extraordinary, too, in its content – directing all courts of law to provide free conditions for political journalism. It does so by detailing and interpreting journalistic privileges in gathering and reporting news and by ensuring certain freedoms to the online media.

For instance, the court's interpretation makes media outlets immune from liability in relation to the content of a candidate's campaign statements, which they are obliged to disseminate by electoral law. Interviews with public officials and leaders of political parties (along with their press officers) are now also protected in the same way.

The resolution discusses at length the media statute and civil code that allow reporting on a person's private life if "necessary to protect the public interest". The notion of such necessity has been rarely used in courts and never explained in Russian law. The supreme court challenges this stalemate by holding that the judges should make a fundamental distinction. It points to a difference between reporting facts – even controversial ones – contributing to democratic debate about politicians in the exercise of their official functions, for instance, and reporting details of the private life of an individual with no such functions. While in the former case the press exercises its public duty by imparting information on matters of public interest, it does not do so in the latter. In this, the supreme court closely followed the arguments of the European Court of Human Rights.

The supreme court also takes note of a provision in the statute obliging journalists to protect the confidentiality of sources except when a corresponding demand comes from a judge in connection with a court case. A court may indeed demand disclosure of a source, but only when all other means of discovery have been exhausted and "there is an overriding public interest in the disclosure of the confidential source".

The resolution deals with an interpretation of the norms that allow media outlets to be closed down: the supreme court states that a court of law should take into account the context, such as the "aim, genre and style of a publication [or] a programme". In particular the resolution refers to the declaration on the media's freedom of political debate by the Council of Europe that says: "The humorous and satirical genre … allows for a wider degree of exaggeration, and even provocation, as long as the public is not misled about facts".

In the context of numerous cases in which journalists have been thrown out of courtrooms by overzealous judges for "overcrowding" them and "obstructing justice", it is important indeed that the resolution explains that closed-door court sessions not directly stipulated by the federal statutes contradict constitutional provisions – and also possibly violates the right to a fair and public hearing in the European convention on human rights and international covenant on civil and political rights.

The resolution also says no licence is required to disseminate programmes via websites. With the shrinking plurality of TV channels in Russia this opens the way to broadcasts on a platform free from control by the opaque, biased government licensing body.

The statue of justice that decorates the new entrance to the supreme court's house three provokes lots of jokes, as it stands with eyes wide open, not blindfolded as elsewhere.

This resolution is a case when justice does not need to keep its eyes shut. It openly pushes the Russian mass media towards socially responsible journalism without fear of pressure, excessive demands and bureaucratic procedures. It instructs judges to guard the interests of professionally honest and high quality journalism. Now we must see whether case law follows its direction.

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